The Dent Named: Casting Couch

Box: Couch stories are known to create their buzz in the media, the very reason why celebrities tend to stay away from it, after all, who like to get their selves entangled in the controversies?
The Indian Television, Media, and Entertainment Industry is one of the largest and fastest growing
sectors, contributing significant amount to the country economy and is on an impressive future growth path, however as exciting it may sound, and exotic as it may seem it has its dark side too – the evilest one being Casting Couch. It is a derogatory practice that not only defames professionalism, but also shows the sickening mentality of few virtued, but undeserving people who get their places fixed in their industry. Casting Couch is a rout turn away, the worst nightmare for any struggler trying to enter the glam world.
Celebrities, TV artists have been witnessed time-to- time to surface bold and speak their minds about the evil practice. Most recently, Ishita Dutta has come out to speak about the issue. She has done a side role in the movie Drishyam, starring Ajay Devgan, Tabu and Shreya Saran in their lead roles, the budding celebrity is soon to be featured in Firangi, opposite to Kapil Sharma. The Firangi actress reported to media in an interview about how schooling and education plays an important role for an individual to take the right decisions, at the same time teaches one to stay grounded even after tasting success. She further mentioned how she will never fall into the couch trap, or ever compromise her dignity. However she isn’t the first one to say this, Kangana Ranaut, the Revolver Rani has seen speaking on the same line in an interview few months back. “Use common sense before pressure, nobody gets success by getting exploited, if the casting couch route was so easy, then all the women from the red light area would have been superstars today” the star quoted to media. Tamil actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar made media highlights February this year. She made the revelation post on her twitter handle. She chose the right
way, by saying an issue that needs to get heard upon.

Read her tweet here:
https://twitter.com/varusarath/status/833548771787161600/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=h
ttp:%2F%2Findiatoday.intoday.in%2Fstory%2Fmalayalam-actress- abducted-varalaxmi-
twitter%2F1%2F887085.html

There are more people from the film fraternity who have come forward and speak of the evil practice, that makes the new strugglers hard to sustain in the industry. In October 2015, Kalki Koechlin has talked about Couch Syndrome in one of her interviews. She has revealed that she had fallen into the trap but has managed to slip away at the right time. According to the actress, the idea is to fall back the moment it gets uncomfortable. Radhika Apte has told an entertainment website in September 2016 that she has never encountered Casting Couch but dealt smartly with an uncomfortable situation that rose once. A Tamil co-actor asked her favors in return for leading her to work on a Bollywood project. I simply laughed! I said you’re so funny, you’re very funny and I said no I’m not. Ask him to go to hell, the actress said.
These are just few couch instances, there are numbers of instances that had made their way into news and public and number of instances that went hidden. These occurrences make a lot of buzz for a couple of weeks, before subsiding into nothing. As the industry keeps shining, the couch occurrences would keep staining dents backstage.